Kurt Schnier

Senior Research Fellow

Kurt Schnier is a professor of economics at the University of California, Merced, and a senior research fellow at PERC. Schnier received a B.S. in management sciences from the University of California at San Diego, an M.A. in environmental studies from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Arizona. His research focuses on conducting policy analysis in the fields of health and resource economics. His health care research has focused on the response of physicians and hospitals to current and impeding regulations that impact the provision of health care. His resource economics research focuses on facilitating the development of efficient marine resource policy and determining how fishermen respond to current and prospective fisheries policy. More specifically, his research has focused on hospital discharge decisions, efficient utilization of organs for transplantation, utilizing property rights in fisheries, estimation of capacity in fisheries and investigating heterogeneous preferences. He was a 2007 and 2009 Lone Mountain Fellow at PERC.

This research empirically investigates cooperative behavior in a natural resource extraction industry in which the provision of a public good (bycatch avoidance) in the Alaskan flatfish fishery is essential to the duration of the fishing season, and an information provision mechanism exists to relay information to all individuals.